Skip to main content

The Kelly Girl

By


Advertisements are a reflection of our society.  This Kelly Girl dates to 1971, but Kelly Services still has many of the same policies in place 40+ years later according to this ProPublica article on the phenomenal growth in temp hiring since the crisis of 2007-08.  Today, corporations farm out their labor the same way they do their products, with an estimated 2.7 million temporary employees in the national workforce.

The majority of these workers are women, finding them subject to tremendous amounts of stress as they have to pitch up as much as two hours early to see if they have work for the day.  Michael Grabell follows Rosa Ramirez, a modern-day "Rosie the Riveter," who at one point was making air filters for the Navy.  None of these temp jobs led to permanent work.  She's been working for a temp agency for 12 years, with virtually no benefits and little in the way of savings to show for it.

Initially, temp companies like Kelly Services were designed almost exclusively for women looking for "pin money."  Today, fewer companies wanting to pay workers' compensation, health care or provide pension plans, temp agencies have flourished, subjecting their workers to unacceptable conditions, especially in the blue collar sector.  The situation is most sever in inner cities, where it looks like we have drifted back to the late 19th and early 20th century, with a preponderance of immigrant workers, who accept these conditions because of limited opportunities.

This echoes the Lowell mill girls of the 1830s, who were easy to control and for the most part were saving toward dowries.  It wasn't long before textile mills exploited the situation, especially with the flood of immigrant workers from the mid 19th century onward.

Unions haven't make much effort to organize temporary workers, partly because of the constant flux of labor.  Unions are more concerned with maintaining permanent jobs.  Attempts at keeping temp workers from crossing picket lines were struck down by the Federal Trade Commission.  In 2004 the National Labor Relations Board barred temp workers from joining permanent workers for collective bargaining unless their temp agency agreed.  Fat chance, especially when many of these temp agencies pride themselves on being anti-union.

The use of sub-contractors allows companies like Walmart to absolve themselves of any blame in the crude practices rampant in the packaging industry, just as these retailers shield themselves from their overseas subcontractors who make many of the products on the shelves.  Naomi Klein explored the international garment industry in No Logo, which has become standard operating procedure in most industries.

While Kelly Services no longer opts for the sexist ads, it still offers many of the same perks to corporations, allowing them to tap into a vast reservoir of cheap labor without having to assume any of the burden of full time employees.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
229 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more